


color, brilliance, strangeness

by anarchetypal



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - GTA AU, Beach Trip, F/M, Fake AH Crew, useless fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 16:27:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4486647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anarchetypal/pseuds/anarchetypal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a novelty, she realizes, to be able to go long stretches of time without feeling the need to look over their shoulders. To rest easy at this level of safe and secure and sequestered from the city they both love but would eat them alive given half a chance.</p><p>Here, they do not look over their shoulders or listen for sirens or reach for weapons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	color, brilliance, strangeness

Jack can’t remember the last time they left the city like this: cruising at only fifteen miles over the speed limit, not glancing out the back window or into the rear view mirror four times a minute—not  _fleeing_ . Not running for their lives.

No police sirens, no flashing lights, no gunshots or shouts or hands pressing firmly against pulsing, bleeding wounds. There are no hastily-packed duffel bags in the trunk.

(“A day trip,” is what Ryan had proposed two nights ago, voice quiet and conspiratorial as they curled around each other in bed on top of rumpled, sweat-damp sheets, catching their breaths in the ringing, sated silence that always seems to follow a quick, hard fuck.

“Day trip,” she’d echoed, the lilt of a question punctuating her words, because  _day trips_ , like mid-morning pottery classes and backyard barbecues, are things that the crew aren’t inclined to do, given their lifestyle.

Because a day trip implies a lot of things, like excessive free time and the ability to sit in a car for longer than thirty minutes without succumbing to the urge to commit a crime or three against common traffic laws—or, often in Gavin’s case, the laws of physics.

“Just us,” Ryan had gone on to explain, which preemptively addressed most of Jack’s concerns, and those that remained were smothered under the weight of Ryan’s coaxing smile and promises of sun, long stretches of road, and “a few fucking hours to relax, Jack, don’t you remember how to do that?”

Which was a joke, obviously, clear in the smile in Ryan’s eyes and the laughter in his voice, but also—not, because they’d all been working hard lately, running jobs back to back to back, and she couldn’t remember the last time it’d just been the two of them for longer than an hour or two stolen away at a time.

And so,  _Don’t you remember how to do that?_

And he’d laughed as she dragged him close by the front of his shirt and kissed him molasses-slow, breathed,  _Oh, I don’t know_ , and grinned and added,  _Let’s find out_.)

So they leave, just the two of them, kissing Geoff a  _see you later_  on the way down to the garage, to the Surano, a pretty little two-door tourer that gets them out of the city before traffic closes in to hold them hostage.

Ryan drives, which is nice, gives Jack the opportunity to roll the seat back and put her bare feet up on the warm dash, heart-shaped sunglasses slid into place on the bridge of her nose against the summer sun.

He’s wearing a tank top that’s well-worn but not bloodstained—an anomaly in and of itself—and humming along to some Top 40s pop tune without immediately seeming to realize that it’s wormed its way into his brain.

When he does, he wrinkles his nose and then smiles a little when she laughs at him.

“Should’ve made a mixtape,” she says. “Fatal mistake number two.”

He glances over and reaches to pluck the sunglasses from her face. “What was fatal mistake number one?” he asks curiously.

She lets him take them, leaning over instead to tap the glass covering the near-empty fuel gauge. “Not getting gas before we left the city,” she says cheerfully.

“Fuck me,” Ryan says with feeling, glancing automatically towards the side of the road for a sign that might hint at how far the next gas station is.

Jack says nothing, just smiles and turns the radio up and snaps a picture of Ryan wearing her sunglasses.

——

She pumps the gas while he ducks inside to pay—breathes in deep the smell of gasoline on hot tarmac and quietly revels in the knowledge that they’re not blowing the station up or robbing the store, that here they become these nowhere nobodies wearing anonymity instead of infamy.

(She is struck, not for the first or last time, with the urge to pack up her boys and leave Los Santos for real, but that’s a thought that belongs to days that are not this one, and so she pushes it down and makes a self-indulgent face at herself in the tinted window of the Surano.)

Ryan emerges from the store, arms laden with bags of snacks and drinks, expression perhaps a little embarrassed but not apologetic in the slightest.

Jack picks through the bags as he gets them back on the highway. Finds, as she expects to, a bottle of Cherry Coke and a package of sunflower seeds. Falls in love with Ryan over again, a fond, daily thing that comes easy as gravity in recent years.

She lets the carbonation of the soda bubble and bite on her tongue as she traces old scars on his arm with her index finger.

——

They go north, following the wavering line of the coast, no real goal in mind.

As it turns out, they’re both still capable of relaxing, hands brushing together every so often over the center armrest, singing along to the radio at varying volumes when something they recognize comes along.

(But: “What are we armed with?” comes Ryan’s voice in a murmur, moments after they both go a little stiff at the distant sound of police sirens.

“The usual,” Jack replies.

“In the trunk?”

“Yeah.”

He laughs as the sirens fade without them ever seeing a single police car. “You can take the criminals out of Los Santos, but you can’t take…”

“The paranoia out of the criminals?”

He shrugs. “Paranoia, preparedness; tomayto, tomahto. What’s a day trip without a gunfight, really.”

She grins at him, raising an eyebrow. “For us? Thus far non-existent.”

“So, preparedness.”

“We are,” she says solemnly, fighting a smile, “the fucking girl scouts.”)

——

Ryan looks young, she thinks, with the sunlight hitting him like it is. They’re way up the coast now, top down to let wind whip their hair into flurries, the plastic of the gas station bags rustling down where they’re pinned to the floor of the front seat by Jack’s shoes.

He notices her watching (as he tends to) and turns his head, flashes her a grin still in those sunglasses and it sends her back five years in a fraction of a second—Ryan, reckless, not quite as scarred, eyes bright, smile playful.

He wears the mask a lot now, she’s noticed, with increasingly more frequency over recent months, and that’s something she should bring up soon, probably, but that thought, like the one at the gas station earlier about leaving Los Santos permanently, is for a day when Ryan’s face isn’t bare and clean of paint and open to her.

They end up at an empty beach so far up the coast Jack doesn’t recognize anything but the sky.

Up the beach the sand is powder fine, getting progressively coarser and shell-mixed close to the water. They walk barefoot, his jeans rolled up to mid-calf and her shorts pockets collecting grains of sand inexorably, bumping hips and arms but not holding hands.

It’s a novelty, she realizes, to be able to go long stretches of time without feeling the need to look over their shoulders. To rest easy at this level of safe and secure and sequestered from the city they both love but would eat them alive given half a chance.

Here, they do not look over their shoulders or listen for sirens or reach for weapons.

(Later, inevitably, Jack will push Ryan into the water and he will allow himself to topple over, will emerge spluttering, hair hanging Grudge-like and dripping, and he will pull her in after him and she’ll let herself fall, laughing, into the cold surf and his arms.

Their hair and clothes will dry as they walk, stiff with salt and sand, and she’ll  _tsk_  at the light burn that has bloomed over the bridge of his nose and tops of his shoulders, making his freckles stand out.

Later, they will sit on the hood of the Surano and exchange kisses that change in rolling waves, from heated and hungry with wandering hands to slow and searching with tangled legs and back again. He will kiss the salt from her neck and she will wonder why they don’t take advantage of living by the ocean more often.

Later, he will press a small white and purple shell into her palm with a teasing smile like a purposefully sappy pastiche of a summer romantic drama, like a joke that’s not a joke, like a boy presenting a schoolyard crush with a freshly-picked dandelion—there is a shyness to the gesture even after all these years and, Christ, Jack loves him, she does, she does—and she will close her fingers over it and tuck it safely into her pocket.

Later, she will tug him close and force him to smile for a messy, tired, sunburned selfie.

Later, she will drive home while the sun sinks low in the sky and watch him nod off in the passenger’s seat, will gently rouse him when they pull into the garage safely, will revel in the fact that he doesn’t jerk awake with wide eyes, fighting the last gasping remnants of a nightmare, but instead stirs slowly, eyelids fluttering open, a languid smile tugging at his mouth when his gaze focuses on her like he just can’t help himself.)

For now, Jack leans against him with a hand slid into his back pocket as they walk down the beach, gaits stumbling on the uneven ground, leaving footprints in the sand in their wake that will wash clear when the tide comes in.

“So,” Ryan says, smug, “good idea? Greatest idea?”

“Fishing for praise?” she fires back, but tugs him to a stop regardless, kisses him deeply and murmurs _thank you_  into his mouth until he’s gasping and wrapping his arms around her and breaking the kiss to bury his face in her neck, and they stand there like that, swaying a little back and forth on the sand and not looking over their shoulders once.

**Author's Note:**

> just doing some cross-posting from my writing/inspiration blog: http://anarchetypal.tumblr.com/


End file.
